Semarang’s Sunken Neighborhood East Kemijen. Sense of Place Dynamics in a Flood Prone Neighborhood
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2016-08-10
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en
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Semarang, Indonesia, has experienced a severe rise in floods and contains a big area with a high risk of flooding. This is being caused by heavy rainfall, land subsidence and sea level rise. Semarang’s neighborhood East Kemijen nowadays lies below sea level and the neighborhood will likely lower in the future, probably resulting in loss of land. Land often is closely linked to people’s identity and thus loss of land often means a loss of identity. This research investigates whether this is the case in East Kemijen by looking at if and how flooding has influenced East Kemijen inhabitants’ sense of their area of residence. The research contributes to the unsolved debate on whether a sense of place is purely a social construct or whether physical attributes of a place, like flooding, also might have an effect on people’s sense of place. With the assistance of translators inhabitants of East Kemijen were interviewed using among others Cross’ (2001) sense of place theory. Analysis based on theory and coding has showed that flooding has both negatively and positively affected East Kemijen inhabitants’ sense of their area of residence. Negatively in the shape of interrupting daily life, making people worry, damaging both property and health, temporarily turning the normally loved environment into a troublesome watery world, which makes inhabitants feel less attached to East Kemijen. Positively in the sense that it might have enabled the East Kemijen community to become more connected as the financially less capable are appointed to each other in the absence of financial coping capabilities.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen